What is Claude, really? A one-minute mental model
People ask what Claude "is" as if the answer were a feature list. It is not. Claude is an AI assistant from Anthropic that you talk to in ordinary language — but the useful mental model is smaller and sharper than that.
Think of an unusually well-read assistant on their first morning. They can summarise, analyse, draft, translate and code at speed. But they have never met you: no memory of last week, no view of your files, and a habit of answering confidently even when they do not know.
Every good technique flows from managing five facts: give context, build persistent knowledge, connect your data, give tools, and verify. Master those and Claude stops being a novelty and becomes a workflow.